English Word Order and the Principle of FSP

Abstract

In the article, the syntactic potential of English is explored by carrying out a functional syntactic analysis of Carson McCullers’ short stories. The analysis shows that the main causes of noncanonical ordering of sentence elements in English are thematization by means of preposing and rhematization by postposing sentence elements. The preposed elements were semantically diverse, though the frequency of occurrence of different process type sentences varied. The postposed elements were process-specific. The ‘syntactic configurations’ of the canonical word order were determined by particular semantic, structural and contextual restrictions.